Migrating Tales situates the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, in its cultural context by reading several rich rabbinic stories against the background of Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Mesopotamian literature of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, much of it Christian in origin. In this nuanced work, Richard Kalmin argues that non-Jewish literature deriving from the eastern Roman provinces is a crucially important key to interpreting Babylonian rabbinic literature, to a degree unimagined by earlier scholars. Kalmin demonstrates the extent to which rabbinic Babylonia was part of the Mediterranean world of late antiquity and part of the emerging but never fully realized cultural unity forming during this period in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and western Persia.
Kalmin recognizes that the Bavli contains remarkable diversity, incorporating motifs derived from the cultures of contemporaneous religious and social groups. Looking closely at the intimate relationship between narratives of the Bavli and of the Christian Roman Empire, Migrating Tales brings the history of Judaism and Jewish culture into the ambit of the ancient world as a whole.
Richard Kalmin is Theodore R. Racoosin Chair of Rabbinic Literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary. He is the author of the award-winning Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine and several other books about the literature and history of the Jews of late antiquity. The research and writing of Migrating Tales was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
"A fascinating book, a real tour de force. In Kalmin's hands, the stories of the Babylonian Talmud become evidence of the Bavli's cultural connections with Greeks, Romans, Christians, and others. If anyone tries to tell you how insular ancient rabbinic literature was, tell them to read this book."—Shaye J. D. Cohen, Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard University
"Kalmin's work represents an outstanding contribution towards identifying the various contexts and influences that shaped the Babylonian Talmud. He offers new and informative readings of rabbinic material and, while carefully applying cutting-edge systems of philological, literary, and textual criticism, he does not overlook the historical contexts that also played a major role in the process. This study poses a stimulating challenge to preconceived ideas of how rabbinic narratives originated and were subsequently refashioned."—Dr. Isaiah M. Gafni, Sol Rosenbloom Professor of Jewish History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
"Migrating Tales puts well-selected stories from the Talmud under a microscope, focusing on very specific details to expose these stories' surprising origins in non-Jewish or non-Babylonian literature. Kalmin's overall emphasis is on the penetration of elements from the west, from the Roman Empire, into a document composed in the east, in the Persian Empire. This book is committed to a set of questions about how to determine provenance and context when dealing with such a complicated, composite document as the Talmud. An important and nuanced statement on how to read Talmudic stories in their late ancient context, one from which serious students and scholars of the Talmud and late ancient literature have a great deal to learn."—Moulie Vidas, Assistant Professor of Religion and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University
306 pp.6 x 9Illus: 1 map
9780520383180$34.95|£30.00Paper
May 2021